Silver and Gold
by Canterville
Summary: After Thor's banishment and redemption, the God of Thunder is crowned King of Asgard. Will his new-found humility serve his kingdom? And what of Loki? When the Trickster returns, can Thor reconcile his loyalty to Asgard with his love for his brother?
1. Prologue: The Weight of a Golden Heart

It's painful. A feeling as bright as this should not hurt this way… But what you stir within me is brighter and hotter than anything that anyone has ever known. Hotter than anyone _should_ ever know. It should be wonderful. _We_ should be wonderful. We could have forever… What we have in its stead is an immortal war. I want to blame you for it. Your effortless glory, your childlike purity. It's that sacrosanct innocence that ruins me. The curse in my blood even extends to my ability to fault you. I have always been helpless against you, no matter how I fight. Always something less than you. My silver tongue is worthless when weighed against your golden heart.

I have worshipped you for that heart.

There are times when I worship you, still. When I must see you, even as I plot against you, and I am consumed by what can only be hatred of you. I cannot even stand up to the venomous hate that I harbour, then. It infects me and I despise myself for wanting nothing more than to fling my arms around you and beg for the forgiveness that you have always held out so freely.

I've never had your strength. Your kindness. The best of you could never show itself in me, while every dark aspect that might have marred your golden heart is all that I am. This is why I will always and forever deceive you. Why I will never fail to scorn that forgiveness and why I cannot surrender to the strength and comfort of your embrace. I must safeguard your heart.

It is all I have.


	2. Chapter One: Falling

The day Loki had left Asgard had been utterly resplendent. Their realm never saw a dark day, but his memory of its beauty was almost more vivid than he could bear. It had all been alight, cast in the warm glow of promise. It had been _his_… And how he had served it! Laufey, the king of their mortal enemies – the Trickster's own flesh and blood – lay in ashes, the wretch's home on the verge of destruction… In the deep of his heart, Loki had known that it was too good, too dreamlike to last. He was doomed to awaken from his every dream, even the wild fancies that accompanied his waking hours were fit only to be snatched out from under him, and like a bird with no wind to carry it, he fell. Unlike the bird, he chose it. Loki had given up his wings long ago. '_Nice feathers…_' Echoes of the past had become clearly audible to him, since his long fall. Time fractured in the gap between realms and he saw it all laid bare before him. He relived it every time he blinked; his childhood, the warmth and love of a family that had never truly needed, or wanted him… And the cold that set in as he began to realize that he was not the favoured son. He fought for it, anyway. It was strange to him, now, that he inherited that distinctly Asgardian tenacity. He had spent his life seeking the favour that his heart had long realized could never be his. How could he win something that had already been given away?

As they often did, perhaps even more frequently now that they were apart, the Trickster's thoughts turned to his brother, though he used the term for lack of anything better, now. The shining bright prince of Asgard who had stolen his wings, like a foolish boy tearing the wings off a fly, unaware of how cruel it was to do so. _Thor_, who could even withstand disgrace and exile without so much as a scratch on the face of his honour, who was as radiant as Asgard itself, beloved of all. Beloved of Loki. The Trickster yearned, only ever for an instant, for those centuries before, when they had both been young, and it had been enough to be his shadow. But the day had come when he was no longer nourished by Thor's love, and once past, only one thing remained. He would be the enemy that he had been born to be. He would never embrace his Jotun blood, but he would answer what could only have been its calling.

'_I could have done it! For you! For all of us…_' What had he been thinking? The good of Asgard… It made him scoff, now. It was almost offensive – if he was still able to be offended – to think that he had ever said such a thing in earnest. It no longer mattered. In those last seconds, looking up at the father who would never be proud of him, and the brother who gave his love away so freely, Loki resigned himself to his failure. His hopes were splintered like the Bifröst under the heavy blows of Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, another of the endless array of things for which a trickster, a _monster_ like him was unworthy to possess. There was no reason to cling to that broken hope, and so he fell. In letting go, the answer had illuminated itself, stark against the whirling colours of the shattered Bifröst, the collapsing pit into which he had fallen, and the anguished blue of his brother's eyes. It was time. It was not Jotunheim that had needed to fall so desperately. No. It was Asgard. Beautiful, burnished-bright Asgard.

His last glimpse of it still played in his memory as he fell into the cold wreckage of what should have meant Jotunheim's obliteration. And, he had thought, his own destruction. Survival had been simultaneously horrifying, and a pleasant surprise too surreal to be of any comfort. The fall that he had initially believed would be the end of him and his disappointments had become something far more opportune. Something even he could not have conceived of. The collapsing bridge ravaged his body like the storm it so resembled, roaring in his ears like too-familiar thunder, the pull of the realms threatened to tear him asunder, and just as he was convinced he would die of that roar in his ears, someone spoke.

'_Laufeyson._' The word was like a knife thrown from outside the radiant bridge, piercing the unbearable howls within and tearing free… And he was saved! Loki stood bewildered and weak-kneed on solid ground, the world a blur, the endless colours of the Bifröst still dancing in front of his eyes. '_Here… Come here!_' It was the voice, again, that brought this new place into focus to reveal that it was not, in fact, as new as he believed. He stood amidst rubble and ruin… Something had blown out one of the walls of a great fortress. An _Asgardian_ fortress. '_Quickly, you fool!_' The beckoning voice hissed, its imperious demand made more urgent by the deathly gasp that prevented any further insults. Lost, and in a rare state of utter confusion, Loki stumbled after the voice until he reached its source. There, pinned beneath the rubble of the half-collapsed wall was a man. The debris had crushed his lower body and with one trembling hand, he held up the block that would have otherwise brought with it instant death. Without thinking, Loki hurried forward, and pushed the chunk of stone aside, kneeling by the wounded man. It wasn't until then that he noticed his _eyes_. They were a green as vivid as his own, and they sparked with the same unrelenting unfulfillment that the Trickster recognized all too well.

"You…"

"Yes," a weak nod confirmed the horrifying truth. "We are the same." Loki could not help the shudder that played its way along his backbone. This man was _him_… Old, decrepit… Dying. What manner of sorcery was this? The shock gave way to a question.

"How?" Loki frowned down at this strange, alternate self, studying the pale, broken face as though he might find the answer in it on his own, if he looked hard enough.

"It matters not! … I have little time." The older man sought to sit up, even just a little, but only collapsed back into the rubble, gasping from the effort. "You… You must come closer…" His hand trembled from the effort it took him just to lift it, and as though for a moment they shared the same will, Loki took that hand in his own. Not a word of instruction passed between them, but Loki knew as well as he knew his own thoughts. He pressed his weakening counterpart's hand against his chest, and with an emerald flicker, a flood of answers rose up to meet the Trickster's every question.

'_You and I are but a pair of many… All of us our own flesh, our own blood… And yet there is one thing we share. Our fate. Ours, and that of Asgard, that of __**Thor**__. We are, all of us, shackled to what we are. We, the Liesmith, the God of Misrule. He, the Thunderer… Our battle is our prison.'_

The hand that had been resting against Loki's chest now grasped at the elaborate breastplate, pulling him near.

"I learned of this too late," his other said hurriedly. "I cannot save us. But you… You might yet set us free." Green mirrored green, until the older pair could no longer bear it. "Go, now… Make haste… Set us free. Set _him_ free…" The broken man pushed him away with the last of his strength and lay still, looking expectantly into the distance. Something was coming.

As the first breath of cold air rolled in, the nature of that 'something' became quickly apparent. It was Thor – different from the man that Loki knew, but identical in the same way that the broken man lying amidst the rubble was also Loki. Mjolnir hung heavy in Thor's grasp, crackling with power. This alternate thunder-god did not speak as he approached his counterpart, a colder fury radiating from him than Loki had ever felt from the Thor _he _knew.

"Thor… Brother, please –" As Loki watched, his other self was silenced by the fall of Mjolnir as it slammed into his chest. The sound of breaking bones was louder even than that of the breath that was forced out of the thin man's body, laced with a terrible gout of blood. Desperate fingers clawed at the hammer's mighty head, but could not even leave a mark on it, let alone shift it. The weight settled until it crushed the last bloodstained breath from the alternate Liesmith's lungs and the scrabbling fingers ceased in their futile attempts to pry Mjolnir from where it had embedded itself. It took a distinct tug before the hammer came free, dripping with gore.

"Enough. Enough of your deceit…" Loki recoiled from the sight, and began, once again, to fall.


End file.
